2.2 GB Portable Discs: Castlewood’s ORB Drive — THG.RU

Perfect Backup Storage Solution: Castlewood ORB Drive

Many users do not think about possible data losses. So-called maximum credible accidents do not happen frequently. A stroke of lightning, overheating or a simple head crash can destroy the data on your hard drive thoroughly. The dissertation, a business plan or a huge data base will be wiped off in an instance.

Some companies specialize in restoring and reconstruction of data on physically damaged drives. However, nobody will be able to guarantee you the success of such a restoration. In addition you can expect to pay tremendous prices for data restoration.

A data loss not only means a lot of trouble but can easily cause financial losses. Many companies would be absolutely paralyzed without their customer data base. A web designer would not be able to complete jobs without his templates, and hardware editors would have to repeat all tests in order to regain the results. Thus it’s quite important to spend some time for data backups now and again. You should primarily concentrate on your address book, emails, downloaded data and programs, last edited files or new files (documents, graphics, sound files) as well as save games and configuration data.
Castlewood sent us their ORB drive, which is available either as an internal IDE or SCSI version or as an external USB or SCSI drive. With a capacity of 2.2 GB it is perfectly suited for backups and in order to make large amounts of data mobile. The IDE model at $ 149.95 is not that expensive. Both external versions are priced at $ 179.95 (USB) or $ 199.95, which is still acceptable. Also the media are sold at quite attractive prices ($ 19.95). That’s what you have to pay for two 250 MB ZIP discs.

Alternative Storage Solutions

The classic way of making backups is the use of tape drives (so-called streamers). Due to the fact that the tape has to be forwarded or rewound to the correct position, data access is extremely slow. Common 3.5″ disks can only host 1.44 MB, disqualifying themselves for backups.

One very popular alternative are CD writers and re-writers. At less than $ 1 per CD-R you can make cheap and fast backups. Data is particularly safe on CD-R media, as you cannot delete it after recording. Of course you can still lose your data if the disc gets damaged physically — as with all other media as well. Yamaha just released their 16-speed writer (2.4 MB/s), 12-speed writers are widely available as well (Asus, AOpen, Plextor and others). CD-RWs are also well suited, but they cannot be written as fast as CD-R discs. In exchange you may erase and re-write data up to approximately 1000 times.

The use of removable disc drives such as Iomega’s ZIP drive models is widespread. Drives and media are available at 100 or 250 MB. The internal versions for IDE or SCSI are fast and reliable. External versions for USB and SCSI are fine as well. The parallel port version does not perform very well due to the limitations of the slow interface. The bigger brother, the JAZ drive, hosts 1 or 2 GB, but is also clearly more expensive (external SCSI or USB, around $ 350).

There is also the LS120 drive which has never been really successful. The media holds 120 MB and are very slim. As an alternative, you can insert common 3.5″ disks into this drive, making the floppy drive obsolete.

SyQuest offers their SyJet at 1.5 GB and the SparQ at a capacity of 1 GB. Both are fast and reliable, but it seems as if they are gradually disappearing.

Technical Specifications

Test Configuration

Performance: Data Transfer Speed

The HD Tach graphic reveals the mapping of the Orb drive. Mapping is the method of storing data onto the disc — here the drive first reads from the outside to the inner side of the disc surface. Afterwards, the drive switches and reads data from the opposite side i.e. from the inside to the outer edge. Differing from most CD-ROM drives, the rotation speed always stays at 5.400 rpm. Due to this, the outer sectors will pass the read/write heads faster than sectors which are situated in the inner part of the disc which explains the result. Write verify was enabled during this test and that’s why the write performance is quite bad.

We repeated this test after disabling the write verify and the write performance increases to a good level.

You may change the write mode of the Orb drive via the included utility software. The Streaming mode is particularly suitable for digital video recording, disabling almost all write verify mechanisms.

Read-/Write Performance

Of course the little Orb drive should not be compared to the latest hard drives. We only included the benchmark results of the IBM Deskstar 75GXP drive to show you the performance difference. The IBM drive starts writing data at the outer disc zones, making the last media zones the slowest ones. As you can see on the previous page, the Orb’s slowest media zone is ‘in the middle’, at 50% of the drive’s capacity.

Disabling the write verify boosts the write performance. The two special modes did not have much impact on our low-level test.

Access Time: As Fast as Older Hard Drives

At approximately 22 milliseconds the Orb drive is as fast as a hard drives used to be in the mid-90s. Todays hard drives are between 10 and 15 ms.

Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0

The Castlewood software can be used with all Windows systems, with only the USB version being difficult to operate using Windows NT 4.0 due to the missing OS support for the USB. We ran the internal IDE drive using all common Windows operating systems. Originally we wanted to do some benchmarks with Windows 2000 as well, but as they do not differ from the Windows 98 results, we decided to drop them.

External USB or Internal IDE — or SCSI?

An external drive can be operated with several computers at different locations. In particular, USB interfaces can be found on almost all motherboards produced over the last few years. Most Notebooks also feature USB connectors, making data change amongst different computers easier than ever before. After attaching the drive, the OS will prompt you to install the driver. As soon as this is done, you may instantly use your Orb drive. Microsoft included USB support with Windows 98. Users of Windows 95 OSR 2.0 or 2.1 will need the USB supplement kit (usbsupp.exe).

The case of Castlewood’s Orb drive is green, so everybody will take notice of this drive on your desk. Unfortunately, we got a USB Orb with an alien power supply, which could not be used in our German lab. Due to this, we could not check its performance. According to our experience, 1 MB/s should be a realistic number.

The internal version is gray like other computer devices. As you can imagine, its installation is neither difficult nor exciting. One jumper is used to set the drive up as master, another will have it run as slave.

We did not have the SCSI models for testing. You can expect similar results as the IDE model, since the interface is not the limiting factor.

A Huge HD or Removable Disk Drive?

$ 19.95 for 2.2 GB do not seem to be cheap on the first view, but comparable products are more expensive. The Orb will lose a comparison with high capacity IDE drives: For $ 200 you can get 10 media or a 40 GB IDE hard drive. Both capacity and performance are clearly better with conventional hard drives.

The negative aspect of a hard drive is its high susceptibility to mechanical defects if you keep installing and removing it to/from different computers. Shocks are especially unhealthy for hard drives. Additionally, there is a little board carrying several chips on the bottom of the drives. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that IC boards are not made to be carried around due to their sensibility to electrostatics and mechanical vulnerability.

Also the power and flat cable connectors are not designed to be strained day by day. Uncommon handling will likely kill soldering points.

Castlewood recommends to use the plastic cases when carrying around the media. The only factor which we cannot check in a short review is the long-term reliability of both the media and the insert and eject mechanism. Smart people treat their hardware adequately. If you do so, I cannot see any reason why the mechanism should fail.

Conclusion

With a capacity of 2.2 GB, Castlewood is offering the largest exchangeable disk drive available. Due to the use of proven technology — as we know it from Iomega and Syquest, the cost for drives and media are pretty attractive. Transfer speed and access time cannot even match today’s low-end hard drives, so don’t try to execute complex software directly from the Orb. Apart from that, however, you can easily load and save your work data directly on it, as you will both keep the data safe and mobile at once.

Thanks to four different versions (internal IDE/SCSI, external SCSI, external USB), every user should be able to find a suitable one. Also companies will get great flexibility, as the Orb can be adapted to every environment — it does not need to be the other way round.